Presentations Made Easy for the Technologically Timid

Presentations Made Easy for the Technologically Timid

Article excerpt

Miami-Dade Community College, Wolfson Campus will be breaking ground this spring for a new building that will incorporate technology products in almost every room. Referred to lovingly as "Building III," this new facility will showcase the effectiveness of technology in education.

Kathie Sigler, the dean for administration at Miami-Dade, is responsible for the new building. She explains that the money to fund the project, which should be completed by the middle of 1994, came from the state and included furniture and equipment.

Determined to get teachers to use different types of equipment as soon as possible, she attended PC Expo and COMDEX in 1991. Her intent was to find the "utmost in projection equipment" for class-room presentations.

Eight Colors

What she found was the Color-Writer by Chisholm in Campbell, Calif. The electronic overlay tablet connects to a computer and either a data projector, large-screen monitor or LCD panel, allowing instructors and trainers to make notes on computer-generated images without affecting them.

Comparable to the technology used by television networks for weather and sports commentation, the ColorWriter offers four line widths and eight colors. It can be simultaneously used as a blank notepad on which instructors can make additional notes.

Sigler recalls picking the unit up and experimenting with it at PC Expo. She was to taken with the ColorWriter that she brought her colleagues to the booth to show them the product. Sigler remembers picking up the tablet and demonstrating its capabilities, even though she had just learned them herself. At that point she knew the units would be easy enough for all to master.

Two Building in One

Immense in scope, Building III will have a fiber-optic network backbone of T1 or T2 lines depending on the video requirements of the installed computers. Two buildings in one, the entire bottom floor is devoted to student support services. One hundred faculty offices and 100 staff stations will each be equipped with computers.

Of the 33 classrooms located in Building III, four will contain approximately 30 computers. A Teaching/Learning Center will give instructors a place to learn about multimedia products in a hands-on environment; 25 computers are planned for that room. …